It’s true that No Man’s Sky didn’t really enjoy the best launch on the PC, but the good news is that its creators have been working hard since then in order to fix most of its issues. Actually, No Man’s Sky has received no less than three major updates, with a fourth one on the way soon. The three patches have reportedly fixed about 70 percent of all of the game’s problems, and the fourth will likely smooth out the remaining 30 percent. Oddly enough, these updates were not accompanied by complete patch notes when they became available, but Hello Games has now released all of the relevant details. On Steam, the game’s developers have issued the following statement:
“Right now the team is fully focused on categorizing and fixing support issues in order of priority, based on the number of people they are affecting. The information and crash dumps you’ve posted have been indispensable in helping us track down and fix these issues.
Next week expect at least one more major update, which will enter testing on Monday once we finish working on it this weekend. Once all our support requests have been answered then we can begin improving the game with new features :).”
No Man’s Sky is quite controversial right now, with some gamers complaining that the title doesn’t offer the same experience as advertised. Still, there are also quite a few people who are enjoying the game in its current state, so I guess it’s all a matter of personal preference. As far as those patch notes are concerned, you can have a look at them below.
Patch 1
AMD Phenom Support
Game is now confirmed working on Phenom CPUs.
Thousands of lines of assembly have been rewritten to support AMD CPUs. The game code no longer relies on anything above SSE 2,
Havok Physics has also now created new libs for us to add Phenom support.
Alt-Tab has improved
Some systems/configs were crashing or not pausing correctly on Alt-Tab. This should now be resolved.
Improved Performance
On CPUs with 4 threads or fewer, performance has been improved.
On CPUs with exactly 8 threads, performance has also been significantly improved.
Framerate Stuttering due to Shader Caching
Framerate was initially stuttering due to shaders not being correctly cached by the GPU on some systems. We have replaced the GPU caching system. You may notice some stutter during the Galactic Map intro to the game (the very first time you run), but it should be smoother from then on. This is particularly true on ATI cards.
Max FPS Cap
On some CPU/GPU configurations, setting Max FPS to 60 or 30 was not giving 60 or 30 FPS (causing stuttering). This has been fixed.
Radeon 6xxx
Added support for this GPU, which doesn’t support OpenGL 4.5 fully.
Save Corruption
Solution to try to prevent saves getting corrupted no matter what’s going on in background processes (see Patch 3 below, where we also are attempting to recover corrupted saves).
Intel GPU Detection
We do not currently support Intel GPUS. We are working on this for a future patch, to expand our min spec.
In the meantime, the game will now let you know if you are trying to run with an unsupported GPU. This will hopefully flag for some users that their high-end GPU has not been selected.
Gsync
Gsync has been disabled by default, which was causing an issue for some users
Mouse Smoothing
Generally this is most helpful for players with sub-30 FPS.
Smoothing on mouse movement has been improved to prevent hitching or stuttering, and is now adjustable through the Options menu in “Mouse Smoothing”.
It defaults to off. If you feel micro stutters in framerate affecting controls, feel free to turn this up. If you feel the framerate is “slow” or “lumpy”, please make sure that this is turned off
Patch 2
Stuck under the world
It was possible for players to save their game stuck under the terrain, leaving them stuck. This was caused by getting shot down in atmosphere, and their ship reaching ridiculous speeds as it crashed to the planet. This has been resolved.
Whilst it won’t happen anymore, if you are currently already stuck under the world, we detect this and do our best to rescue you.
Crash after warping
Occasionally at random the game would lock up after a warp, or return to desktop. This was due to very specific timing in hardware (a threading specific bug) – meaning that unfortunately for some people it was regular, and for others they would never be able to recreate it. This was our most reported crash during gameplay, and has now been resolved.
Game failing to save until you died
If the player died, and then loaded the game ten times without saving, and then died, player progress wouldn’t be saved from then on until you died again. This is fixed now! This was also causing player’s saves to grow in size.
Crash fixes in scanning
Quite a rare crash, but in certain scenarios it was possible to scan from space or on planet and crash the game.
Crash warping inside a freighter
When warping into a battle sometimes the player warped into the inside of a freighter and everything went crazy ?
This is fixed now.
Patch 3
Stranded in Space Station
If you died in your ship while in atmosphere of a planet with a damaged ship, you could respawn in a space station with your launch thrusters and pulse engine damaged. If you did not have the resources to fix them then you could no longer take off and be stuck there. This will no longer happen.
Loading Corrupted Save Files
Some players have corrupted save files, we’ve been working with them to still load saves even if they are corrupted (this can happen for many reasons outside of the games control). This fix has allowed many players to still load their save even if they have become corrupt on PC.
Crash fixes for next three most commonly reported issues:
As the player gathers a huge amount of discoveries, there was a threading issue that becomes more prevalent the more discoveries you have, and could cause the game to crash.
If you had collected a large number of blueprints, in a specific order it was possible to crash the game when you received a new blueprint. This has been fixed.
Players who set a large number of waypoints could find themselves in a situation where they could crash the game in the Galactic Map, this is remedied now (PS. A better waypoint system is coming).
Cernescu Andrei
Candrei is a writer for eTeknix who loves the latest technology news and gaming.